AA Architectural Association

Research Cluster

Beyond Entropy / When Energy Becomes Form

Chemical Energy

John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (Territorial Agency), Amanda Chatten, Nina Canell

Life is structured in many of its most complex forms around the chemical processes of metabolism.

The form-generating processes that shape and define life in its primary traits are transformations of the chemical energy of the covalent

bonds of carbon-based molecules present in the atmosphere. While photosynthesis transforms this energy into forests,

metabolism transforms food into complex living organisms. The research project on the form-generating processes

linked to chemical energy sets out to investigate the transformations of contemporary human environments through an

analysis of their material configurations within complex chains of food and energy production and distribution, at the

territorial and at the individual level.

Today, human life is reshaping and moulding these processes at an unprecedented scale, transforming and recasting

environments within a set of circulations that are often as invisible as the chemical energy transformations that underlie

them. The growth of urban environments and the reshaping of vast territories through new system of control and

infrastructure is directly changing the way we conceive of our spaces of operation. A large polyptych will present a series

of local spatial transformations in one of the regions of the planet most sensitive to changes in the atmosphere: the

North. The spatial transformations at the northern latitudes reveal in an unprecedented manner the sweeping changes in

the architecture of contemporary inhabited territories.

On the tangents of the material and immaterial world, this lingering reverie will be precisely presented in the form of

an enclosed object in which the oxygen level has been slightly raised by an increase of 5 percent.

Furthermore, to exemplify the nature and symmetry of chemical energy at a microscopic scale, Dr. Amanda Chatten is collaborating with

Prof. Henry Rzepa who has developed a method to explore the Laplacian in 3D. In quantum mechanics the Laplacian

is central to the energy term of the Schrödinger equation and when visualized it provides a unique insight into the form

of chemical energy and chemical reactivity. The dichotomy of the contained nature of this sublimated ‘nothingness’

functions as an antidote to the elemental imagination of air in relation to movement (as well as energy and entropy for

that matter). As so eloquently proposed by Gaston Bachelard in Air and Dreams: “…(poetic) images of air, the least

solid of the elements, reveal a fundamental dynamic imagination that shapes our very perception of reality”. This is true,

perhaps in the most direct sense, in the intimate but complex act of breathing itself.

To coincide with this presentation Robin Watkins will stage a sound screening of The Luminiferous Aether: ELF/VLF

recordings of the Solar Wind, recorded in the Arctic Circle (Alaska), and transmitted to the audience via radio waves.

In quantum mechanics the Laplacian represents the kinetic energy term of the Schrödinger equation. When visualised it

provides a unique insight into the form of chemical energy and chemical reactivity.